Two years ago New Directions issued a book edited by Jeffrey Yang entitled Birds, Beasts and Seas, Nature Poems from New Directions. Had Mark Pawlak’s Go to the Pine: Quoddy Journals 2005-2010 appeared there is no doubt at least one of the poems in his book would have been included.

Pawlak’s poems are more than just poems, they are paintings a verbal presentation of what an artist would perceive when painting in oils or watercolors. For example, the opening poem, 31:VII:05 is something so visual, that you are certain you have seen the scene before:

We have all been there. The woman in black, the corroding dragger and snappy sailboat, the houses and ocean, the islands and spruce trees. Pawlak brings it all back, brings us back to the dream-like real world where we might like to be if we didn’t have our daily lives.

In 7:VIII:05 he has an encounter we might all enjoy:

Coming over the rise

upon apparition:

deer in the road,

wide-eyed, quizzical—

doe & me both.

Then blink-of-an-eye gone.

(Who blinked first?)

Fog. Fog in headlights.

Again he has drawn a sketch of a moment in time when we exchange a look with nature that may never be repeated, indeed, perhaps the fog make us think it never occurred. And that it was just a painting or a dream.

Pawlak also finds poems in signs. In Quoddy Journal 2006 on 26:VII:06 he presents a newspaper and a sign:

Bangor Daily News:

"The Brady Gang came to Maine in the fall of 1937 for the same reasons 21st century criminals venture north of Boston—seafood, foliage, and guns."

Guns? Ah, guns!

PAWN

GUNZ

GUNSHOP

AHEAD

There are more signs, an advertisement "squeezed between the pages of a spiral notebook" and other writings that Pawlak can magically turn into found poetry.

And there’s always one of my favorites which ends with the "tongue of the ocean insinuating itself."

Ahhh, this is a book of poems (mixed poetry, prose poetry, found poetry and verbal painting) which calm the soul and bring smiles to the lips.

Thursday, May 02, 2013

I sent Alan Kaufman, the editor of The Outlaw Bible of American Literature,The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, and the final entry of the Outlaw anthologies trilogy, The Outlaw Bible of American Essays, a note telling him I was using the The Outlaw Bible of American Literature in my Urban American Literature course at Endicott College in Beverly, Mass.. He wrote me back:

"Here's a little anecdote that you might want to impart to your students, as a point of interest. On Tuesday, I was invited by the Sheriff's ...Dept, as part of National Poetry Month, to go into San Bruno County Jail to speak about writing to a group of incarcerated largely African-American military veterans. I asked the inmates if they'd heard of Robert Beck? Hands shot up. 'You mean Iceberg Slim!' they called out and proceeded to reel off the titl! es of his books, PIMP, TRICK BABY, et al., and all kinds of inside information about him. Then, I asked: have any of you ever heard of Donald Goines? More hands shot up!! He wrote, they called out, NEVER DIE ALONE, BLACK GANGSTER, WHORESON, et al. and again poured out a wealth of details about his career and life. Had I put the same question to a room full of literary-minded caucasians, as I often have,I would have gotten blank stares. One of my aims, in editing THE OUTLAW BIBLE OF AMERICAN LITERATURE was to break down this segregating literary wall that still exists in our country. Two worlds, in which one knows nothing about the fact that writers like Goines and Beck are the biggest selling authors in their communities nationwide. But because of their color and because, as the inmate veterans said Beck and Goines "Keep It Real" they are, to this day, and despite being spellbinding writers of high literary merit, critically ignored, and left completely out of the national ! discourse. So, it's heartening to know that college students are using this book and gaining exposure to the Other side of American literature. Thank you for your courage in fostering that."

I asked Kaufman for an interview and he generously consented:

Doug Holder: Give me your definition of a literary outlaw.

Alan Kaufman: Well, the sense that I mean is largely in an American vein. But even there, one must distinguish in kind. For example, Hemingway and Faulkner were very much in the mode of the Damun Runyon hobo/bohemian writer popular at the time-- one who consorts with riff-raff and criminals and the like, a vein that begins with Twain and Whitman and Melville—the 'Redskins' referenced in Philip Rahv’s seminal essay 'Palefaces and Redskins'--and extends through Sherwood Anderson who, one day rose from the paint factory he owned, walked onto the railroad tracks and in a state of breakdown ended up in Chicago, where he became a writer (in realty he made it to, I think, Cleveland, was rescued by his wife and for years continued to work in the advertising business for years whole writing his novels). This refutation of respectability was succinctly American. Only an individual driven to the extreme edge of personal crisis could conceive of abandoning Capitalist respectability for a precarious life of art: one had to be literally nuts to become an uncompromisingly honest writer. As mentor to Hemingway and Faulkner, Anderson passed this model along. And yet this very tradition stops short of Henry Miller who never achieves the acceptance conferred upon these predecessors.

Miller is an important point of divergence. Because though both Hemingway and Faulkner wrote early on with a sense that the respectable is antithetical to great art—that, as Faulkner put it, “a great novel is worth any number of old ladies”--in other words, a writer must be willing to break every rule to express his truth-- still, and despite that Faulkner liked to disport in ragged tramp clothes and Hemmingway never washed--they achieved the unequivocal embrace of the mainstream and even won Nobel Prizes. This is perhaps because they offered versions of the self that were, in the wake of the First War’s horrors, forgivable, understandable, even admirable: a whole generation emulated Hemmingway's hard-bitten and private code-driven heroes.

But there is nothing “admirable” about Miller, who stands in guffawing disdain of America and her values and surrealistically dances, so to speak, on what he perceives as America's air-conditioned zombie corpse. He was a hedonistic and an Europeanly selfish prophet of total rejection of whatever his world stood for.--closer to Spengler then Whitman(he claimed both as influences). And though he earned the praise of such writers as Orwell and Huxley, he could never be fully embraced by the mainstream and to this day remains, an outsider. And even when he finally gained broad commercial success once my friend, co-editor and also publisher Barny Rosset brought out Miller's Tropic of Cancer, he yet faced pernicious rejection---his book stood trial before the Supreme Court, and after a a couple of decades of being read to the amusement of chiefly hippies or the likes of Norman Mailer who appreciated Miller for all the wrong reasons, the author fell from sight again. Today, far fewer read Miller then ever before.

Thus, a literary outlaw is a writer who has either lived on the margins of society or else felt themselves to be relegated by personal circumstance to an extreme edge of human experience.

The author's sense of separation, alienation must be deeply personal and profound. This experience births a new and often radical sort of perspective –though not necessarily political-- that demands to be expressed in an effort to bridge the gulf between oneself and humanity, to make a case for ones membership in the common plight; a corrective to an injustice.

No one ever wanted full acceptance more then Miller. Near the end of his life he campaigned vigorously for a Nobel Prize, to no avail. The very notion was ludicrous. Yet, poignantly, he tried. So, too, with Charles Bukowski, considered a consummate rebel, but who wrote, at the end of his life, about the joys of paying for Hollywood dinners with a gold credit card. Only a true outlaw could grasp the pleasures of finally gaining acceptance.

As such, outlaw writers are inherently more moral then the very society that outlaws them. For in portraying his or her condition the outlaw writer who really craves acceptance learns, since everything is at stake, that any sort of internal or normative restriction on absolute naked honesty constitutes not merely betrayal of their experience but of the literature they are seeking to form. This alone is a paralyzing dilemma. But then, if the decision to write is made the writer often discovers, paradoxically, that not only do the popular formal conventions prove inadequate to what he or she must express but that the only way to express it is through outright transgression—artistic and moral---against the most sacred premises of the society and its literature.

The irony of this must be grasped. For the writer who feels cast out of and seeks somehow to reclaim his relationship to society can only do so by a literary act of complete iconoclastic destruction of acceptable ideas and forms, which in turn only marginalizes the writer even further . The work provokes response ranging from outright dismissal or critical scorn, commercial rejection or social ostrcacization to legal resort and even threats of violence.

This is true of everyone from Allen Ginsberg, poet of HOWL, to Iceberg Slim, author of PIMP. Each are cases made against a version of social norm that has proved, in the author's own experience, not merely hypocritical but savagely murderous. Sometimes, though, as in the case of Donald Goines, author of the masterpiece 'Never Die Alone', one finds among the subterranean social strata of one’s own impoverished and criminalized milieu a vaster reading audience then any mainstream writer could ever dream of having. Goines, brilliant by any standard, is widely known among chiefly Black men incarcerated in American prisons, and remains largely unknown to the mainstream..

DH: I share with you a Jewish heritage. Do you think Jews are natural outlaws?

AK: Because my mother was a French-Jewish Holocaust survivor I was inculcated early on with the sense that even among American Jews I did not belong to a normal state of affairs that the blood of horror and survival ran in my veins. Her tales of horrific ordeals in the war were my childhood Harry Potter stories. She imparted to me a very keen sense that the world of the Holocaust was another kind of world then the one we know, and that though ignored and denied, yet it lurks everywhere, awaiting its return, to devour the rest of us Jews that Gentiles neither grasp nor care about what happened to our people at Auschwitz, Belson, Buchenwald.

My father, a Bronx-born Jewish street guy, came from a very criminalized family. Two of my cousins died at Rikers Island. A third died with a needle in his arm in his mother's bathtub. Neither of these two experiential trajectories are typical of most Jews.

And yet, they are signifiers of an outlaw fate that begins in the Torah when Abraham, the first Jew, an iconoclast, smashes the popular idols of his day, renouncing commonly worshipped deities like Moloch and Baal who horribly required devotions of child sacrifice. A great deal of the Torah is an account of the Israelite effort to purge child sacrifice from the world. Perhaps this is the birthing essence of morality itself, which begins in the helpless child's need for protection from the parents and the parents’ efforts, against all cost, to provide it. Abraham refutes these child-murdering deities through the expression of an innate moral sense that is so alive in him that it drives him to rebellion against the very norms and Gods of his day, in favor of an invisible God who is a new kind of moral authority, a personal God, one guiding Abraham's steps through the very world that he revaluates as not only not commonplace but actually corrupt.

Abraham is an ultimate kind of outlaw of extraordinary faith and courage. That is what I find so moving about the Akidah, the story of Abraham and Isaac, in which Abraham's faith in the essential ethical rightness of his God is so complete that even when he is presented by that God with a seeming contradictory command, to sacrifice his own son, he goes through every step, each motion of the horrific ritual, right to the very last knife-plunging finale when, dramatically, the Angel stays Abraham's hand.

The meaning of this, I think, is that Abraham knows implicitly that his God would never permit him to perform child sacrifice. That God's ethical sense is what guides his, Abraham's own hand, rather than Abraham's own flawed and human personality. But none of this has yet been codified. It is Abraham, the outlaw iconoclast, following his own deviating outsider code, like any Robin Hood would, or Hells Angel.

And then, in Judaism, the most beloved figures, David and Moses are outlaws. Moses, born an outlaw by Pharisaic edict that all first-borns of the Hebrews are to be slain, is saved and lives to not only kill an Egyptian overseer, for which he must lam it out of Egypt but then, leads his entire people out of Egypt—an illegal act of rebellious exodus for which he and the others are pursued, hunted, by Pharaoh’s charioteers, who intend to kill them, man, woman and child.

In the desert, once Moses goes up to the mount to get instructions from God, the Hebrews quickly resort to idolatrous behavior. Moses, in turn, smashes God's commandments on their heads—an irreverent act of personal anger. I mean, God wrote His laws on those tablets with a fiery finger! To destroy that text as an act of their affirmation suggests a literary method that prefigures the Modernism of Joyce and Hemmingway by thousands of years. And then, having brought the Hebrews to the borders of the Promised Land, Moses is banned from entering. He must, even in death, retain his outlaw status. For the outlaw, the smasher of convention, there can be no accommodation, no rest.

There is a Chassidic explanation somewhere that Moses was not allowed to enter the Land because he had killed the overseers, just though it was—that God's holy prophets cannot, under any circumstance, kill. Thus, the Chassidim regard Moses as an outlaw. But I like to think of it rather that Moses was a visionary and that a visionary cannot cross over into his own vision. He, like the artist, is outlawed from that which he summons from out of the imagination.

David, the most beloved figure in Judaism, was, of course, for a time, an outlaw, who served as leader of a mercenary band, who raided and pillaged. As king he was a murderer and a shameless philanderer. Yet, we love David, for his courage, his hubris, his artistry, his beauty and his powerful and repentant poetry in the Psalms.

We Jews have lived on the margins of normal human society for millenniums, hounded, rejected, ghettoized, refused, slain—though that, I think, produced a kind of culture of delusion which made us blind to the real meaning of the coming of Hitler. In some sense, we Jews once more occupy a mindset strangely not unlike that of Jews before the Holocaust. A paralyzing denial about the threatening shadows growing over us.

Zionism was born out of a sense keenly felt by Theodore Herzl (himself a consummate assimilationist his first solution to 'The Jewish Problem' mass conversion to Christianity) that we Jews are doomed never to find acceptance among non-Jews and thus the only possible recourse for us is to possess our own State and military.

Interestingly, he was at the time of the writing of The Jewish State --his call for Jewish statehood--the Paris correspondent for the Neu Frei Presse, the NY Times of his day. He was a journalist of the stature of, say, Thomas Friedman. And he came feverishly to his conclusion that a Jewish State was our only hope after witnessing the public denigration of Alfred Dreyfus, a fully assimilated and completely loyal French-Jewish army captain, who was falsely accused of treason and condemned like any common outlaw to a lifetime of penal servitude in the penal colony in French Guyana, a hellish fate.

Of course, events proved that Herzl was right. Fifty years later, still without a state of our own, six million (!) Jewish men, women and children were systematically slaughtered by the Nazis and with the fairly complete cooperation of the European nations
.

Today, Israel, Zionism and Jews as a people face increasing marginalization on a global scale—an effort to delegitimize not only the Jewish State but the very right of Jews to exist at all. For if modern history has incontrovertibly proved anything, it is that a Jewish people without a state and army of our own are doomed to certain annihilation.

Lastly, Jewish marginalization has produced a tendency among our writers to either embrace the literary mainstream and all its compromises with a zeal verging on self-righteousness---the writers who came up with Partisan Review, like Bellows, Roth, Malamud (once known as the Hart,Shaftner and Marx of Literature) or else to go in the complete opposite direction of literary outlawry, like Ginsberg, or d.a. Levy, or Tuli Kupferberg, or even, strangely, the reincarnated Henry Roth of 'Mercies of A Rude Stream' who goes from classic modernist to late-age shameless post-modern self-revealer of a lifetime of incest with his sister, and other fascinatingly sordid revelations.

DH: Do you find that the outlaw poets and writers you published some years ago are now part of the canon to a greater extent?

AK: Yes and no. Today, writers like Iceberg Slim and David Goines are no better known than they were before I published The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, The Outlaw Bible of American Literature and The Outlaw Bible of American Essays. On the other hand, thanks to those books they have gained more audience then before among the young, college-educated elite. Some, like Sapphire, have gone through the roof of success and kept going. But is Sapphire part of the Canon yet? Popular, yes; canonized: no. Hubert Selby Jr. is still pretty much overlooked today. Mid-career writers like Patricia Smith, Luis Rodriguez, Paul Beatty have gone on to become respected their books issued by excellent publishers, yet none have reached higher then, say, a mid-list status in the mainstream lit world. And others like d.a. Levy or David Lerner, though more widely recognized for their brilliance, are no more widely read then before. Their names are known. A poem here or there remarked. But nothing more. Or take Kathy Acker, whose name was once a byword of literary discussion. Kathy is almost completely forgotten today. No one reads her. I've been shocked to mention her name to younger writers who return blank stares: 'who's that?' they ask. In other words, the Outlaws still are waiting for their day. The greatest achievement of the Outlaw anthologies was to articulate for future scholarship a new stream of literary discourse which is now part of the larger discourse, and to familiarize young high school and college students—future scholars-- with this kind of writing, and these sorts of authors. Someday, they will be recognized as more then anomalies ---admired for their strange brilliance, their terrifying candor, their gutsy innovations.

DH: There is always a fascination with criminal writers from Genet to Jack Henry Abbott... What do you think the source of this fascination is?

AK: The belief that out of extreme experience some brand new insight into the human will be revealed. Also, there's the Walter Mitty’s voyeurism of the cowardly conformist who vicariously spits in the face of his or her oppression through reading about the outsider life of real revels. Also, behind it is a human intuition that when the chips are down, when authority mutates abusive evil, only outsiders with nothing to lose will dare to risk everything in order to defy it. This was actually borne out during WWII in France by the fact that oftentimes the early resisters were outsiders. A criminal has the ability to pretend to be legal, a square citizen, while secretly conducting his or her illegal enterprise. That is integral to the mounting of a successful act of resistance. It's little known for instance, that Samuel Beckett, a complete literary outsider in every respect, and despite his Nobel Prize, was also an active member of the French Resistance, for which he received a Croix du guerre. He never talked about it. In The Sorrow and The Pity we meet one of the first Parisian resisters: a pipe-smoking Beat-style weirdo with a taste for opium, a penchant for outsider lit and who looks like a cross between Sherlock Holmes and William Burroughs. By the way, as a young man slumming in Nazi Germany in the 30's, Burroughs subversively married a Jewish woman to enable her to escape from Hitler's grasp. So, we sense, or hope, romantically, that the outlaw will possess a rough code of justice that will pull through in a pinch. Sometimes they do.

DH: You have a memoir out about your life--and your trials and travails with booze. What is it about booze and the muse? Do you think a lot of young writers and poets are fixated on libations of one sort or the other. Have booze and drugs helped you creatively?

AK: The book you're referring to is DRUNKEN ANGEL, which just came out in paperback. The hardcover appeared last year. It's my second memoir, actually. The first, JEW BOY, recounts my experiences as the son of a survivor. DRUNKEN ANGEL chronicles my hellish descent into alcoholism and the incredible turnabout in events that lead to my becoming clean and sober, which I now have been for 22 years. Of course, yes, I bought into the whole drinking and drugging myth of the American literary genius. The problem was, I couldn't write a thing worth a damn while drunk. For that reason I strongly suspect that, say, Bukowski was not actually a real alcoholic, but just a drunk who could control his drinking as needed. This was recently confirmed for me by his long-time consort and biographer, Neeli Cherkovski, who said that Bukowski was, in a sense, a very high-maintenance drinker who could keep a job for ten years in the post office while he built his career and crank out book after book. So too Faulkner and Hemmingway. Bad drunks, yes. Alcoholics: I don't think so. A true alcoholic dosen’t write and publish book after book after book and sustain a career in Hollywood or off hunting big-game. Of lucky, he maybe produces one book, like Hubert Selby Jr., who comes out with LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN and then descends into a nightmare addiction and poverty. It was only when he got sober that he began to generate the other books which kept him alive as a writer. I knew him through the publishers of my book JEW BOY, Fred Jordan and Barney Rosset, who did the paperback and hardcover respectively. Selby Jr. when sober he was the dearest man alive. He once asked me in a telephone chat if I was sober and when I replied yes, revealed that he had 25 years clean and sober. I nearly fell out o f my chair with surprise. For me, the real writing of books and anthologizing of others began when I stopped drinking in 1990. Drinking had taken me into the streets of the East Village where I was dying. It killed every possibility to be a writer. Realizing that, and with help from another writer, I began my climb out, one day at a time, and the books have come one after another ever since. No, I don't believe that drugs and alcohol are necessary to the creation of literature: to the contrary—they are the enemy of creation.

Wednesday, May 01, 2013

"The world’s in a mess and I want romance," the character Maryanne Hobson says to herself while driving her taxi and thinking about life. On Sunday April 14th, I had the pleasure of seeing Dan Sklar’s comedy, Hack License, preformed at the Actors Studio of Newburyport. This play takes place in New York City and revolves around the taxi driver, Maryanne Hobson, and the various interesting characters that she drives around.

The taxicab that the play centers around is simple, but it fits in very well with the surroundings. Also, the qualities of Charles Burchfield’s paintings, an artist that is one of Maryanne’s obsessions, can be seen in the set’s design of New York City. Overall, the set has a very primitive feel to it, which is a perfect fit for the playwright’s style as a writer and artist.

Maryanne likes to keep track of things, drive around in her taxi, and tell everyone everything about herself. In fact, her character is so out there that it is impossible not to like her. All Maryanne wants is to find a sweet, loving boy that thinks she is beautiful inside and out, and who paints like Charles Burchfield. The fact that Maryanne is looking for someone with such a specific qualification like his painting style is very humorous, and adds depth to her character and the plot. One would think that Maryanne would be forever alone, because she is limiting herself to someone that may not exist, or someone that she may never meet.

Maryanne’s first fare is a woman named Harriet, who is irritable and late for a meeting. The audience is instantly laughing when they hear familiar lines like, "Do something about this traffic!" and "Start the meeting without me, you don’t need me. But don’t talk about anything until I get there." People have heard these types of conversations in one form or another through work, or just when they are out in the world. This scene shows that in life people are always so hung up on getting somewhere as fast as possible. When someone is stuck in traffic, instead of being hung up on this concept, they should make the most out of things slowing down.

One of the funniest scenes in the play is when Tom and Nancy, an arguing couple, are going back and forth on whether or not to return the Walt Whitman letters that they stole. Tom is telling Maryanne to step on it, and to take them to Grand Central Station, while Nancy is telling Maryanne to take them back to 75th street. Maryanne’s facial expressions are priceless, because she is so excited to "step on it", because no one has told her to do this before. She is also confused and overwhelmed because she is being given two completely different directions at once. Maryanne ends up pulling over and breaking up their argument. Tom and Nancy take an oath on Maryanne’s hack license that they will let Maryanne decide what they will do about the situation they are in. Maryanne takes this oath very seriously, and the whole situation is so ridiculous and humorous. When Maryanne finally hears the story, it is revealed that Tom’s grandmother stored these letters in her attic, and when a housepainter asked her if he could have them, she gave them to him and he then sold them to an autograph shop. Tom feels as though he is entitled to these letters because he thinks his grandmother should have given them to him instead of a stranger. After telling the story, Tom and Nancy fight again, and Nancy tells Tom that he cares more about the letter than he does about her. Tom says this is not true, and he proposes to her. The fact that Tom and Nancy go from one extreme emotion to the other makes the audience crack up, and sit on the edge of their seats. Maryanne marries the couple, while using her hack license to do so.

The scene that I found to be the most intense and emotional is when Maryanne thinks that Alice Jones, an economics professor, is her mother. The moment that Maryanne looks at Alice in her cab she says that she looks really familiar. Maryanne instantly looks troubled as she searches Alice’s face in the rear view mirror. Suddenly, as Maryanne and Alice are talking about the United Nations, Maryanne calls Alice "Momma". Alice is extremely confused, and tells Maryanne that she is mistaken. Maryanne insists that Alice is her mother though, and that she left her and her eight sisters behind. Alice suggests that they stop for coffee and talk, and tells Maryanne to keep the meter running. "That meter is like our lives, keep it running," Alice says to Maryanne before they walk into the coffee shop. When they are in the coffee shop Alice talks to her as though she is her mother because she tells her that she wants her to own her own taxi. "I want you to be financially and mentally independent," Alice lectures her. Maryanne tells Alice that she sleeps in the Planetarium, that all she wants is to be loved, and how she knows the note, that Alice left years ago, by heart. At the end of the scene Alice tells Maryanne that she wishes that she really was her mother, and that she’d never leave her. "Maryanne, do you want me to be your mother?" Alice asks her. "What?" Maryanne is confused. "I’ll be your mother if you want me to be," Alice says to her as they are standing close together. This conversation is so powerful because Alice wants to care for Maryanne, and it is up to the audience to decide whether or not Alice is actually Maryanne’s mother. When this scene ends, and transitions to the next, that actress playing Maryanne’s character takes a few extra seconds to break out of this strong emotion.

At the end of act II, scene III, Maryanne meets Nick Hart. Nick crashes into the taxi with his bicycle because the taxi stops short. The whole situation is so dramatic, sudden, and loud that it makes the audience burst out in laughter. When Maryanne meets Nick, and apologizes for what happened, she immediately asks him if he paints like Charles Burchfield. He does not answer her, though because he is confused by the random nature of her question, and is too distracted about his broken bicycle. During the next two scenes Maryanne and Nick fill out an accident report together, which Maryanne uses in order to get to know Nick better. She asks him if he paints like Charles Burchfield, and he is in shock because he does in fact paint like him. Maryanne and Nick then look into each other’s eyes and fall in love. During this scene it is also revealed that the Nick is that housepainter that sold Walt Whitman’s letters to the autograph shop. I really like how events from the beginning of the play come full circle and link to the end.

Dan Sklar’s play is very thought provoking and is filled with dangerous situations, lost souls, and a longing to experience life in a different way. Each character reminds me of someone that I have known, or has a persona that I have seen somewhere in life before. At the end of the play I realize that in a way, the audience is like Maryanne’s character. She observes the world and the people, and has big hopes for how her life will turn out. As an audience we observe the characters, relate them to our lives, and hope it will all turn out a certain way.

**** Emily Pineau is the author of No Need to Speak a poetry collection published as part of the Young Poets Series at Endicott College.

Monday, April 29, 2013

The Better Bombshell: Writers and Artists Redefine the Female Role Model, edited By Charlotte Austin

By Luke Salisbury

This large size paperback is a collection of short fiction and essays each coupled with artwork to "redefine" as the subtitle has it, "the female role model." "Bombshell," for those not old enough to remember, is a word from the 1940s and 50s equivalent to "broad," "dish," "tomato," "whistle bait," describing a woman found desirable by men, and not for her personality. The use of the word in the title seems provocative and retro. Fear not. The Better Bombshell is as PC as any academic at a New England college might wish.

But this isn’t bad. In fact, the book is good, some of it quite good. Bombshell doesn’t try to be a bombshell. It isn’t shocking, furious or preachy. It makes us feel. There is much here. The word goddess frequently appears; we have the obligatory drag queen; a mountain climbing instructor whose male instructees puke and seek the meaning of life; Angela Davis; a woman superhero with six arms (And six armpits as the story wittily points out); a very good short story Amazon: Three Versions with the memorable line "High school: four year torture chamber for anyone with an original or idiosyncratic thought;" Treatises on Desire, an intense essay from the Georges Batailles post structuralist deconstructed masochist academic void; a fine short story Important Things To Know with sections titled Important Things to Know About Loose Women, Important Things To Know About Frigid Women, Important Things To Know About Crazy Women, Important Things To Know About Mother; a script for a thirty second movie of the Biblical Yael murdering a sleeping man (A male author. Is this a male fantasy of female empowerment?); a very good story of difficult sexual initiation and sad consequence with quotes from Chapter 17 of the Book of Revelations; and more, much more, all accompanied by artwork ranging from a pretty ten year old girl holding an automatic weapon (De rigueur), a fine photo essay of a fashion model caught in that role and New York City, a male mountain climber showing his naked butt (Go figure), the drag queen preparing, young women looking in mirrors, and so on.

Dave Barry’s essay What Men Want is marvelous. What they want is not hair styles and shoes. His tone is perfect—that combination of cynicism, whimsy and desparation that underlies much male attitude. Rick Bass’s essay on fatherhood (Two daughters), nature, and how he might do some of it again, is simply beautiful, and bears rereading, perhaps many times. The piece that broke new ground for me was A History of My Breast Cancer in Bombshells by Eva Saulitis, with equally profound art by Kate Protage. This is the most powerful description of cancer I have read. Not sensational, self-pitying or melodramatic, but the tale told from the inside, of denial, fear, terrible awareness, and tremendous understanding. The graphite and ink black and white images capture the abstract but deadly feel of that silent, terrifying intruder that will affect one in four American women.The Better Bombshell is an ambitious and intriguing project. It succeeds. It’s worth the money and your time. Let us all have more complex role models.

**** Luke Salisbury is a professor of English at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston.

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Last Night at the Wursthaus by Doug Holder

Michael Casey ( Winner of the Yale Younger Poetry Prize--"Obscenities") "This book is a wonderful and entertaining read. It is maybe ten years since I read a book so good that I wished it had more pages. I hope the author is working on a sequel." Neil Silberblatt (Founder of Voices of Poetry) writes, " These poems work for anyone with the gift and curse of memory..." To order click on picture.

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August Wilson The late playwright August Wilson. "He Really Wanted to be a Poet" The following is an article by my frien...

Newton Writing and Publishing Center

(Click on pic to go to site) The Newton Writing and Publishing Center provides guidance, inspiration, encouragement, and all the tools you need to revise your work to perfection, whether it’s a novel, a poem, a short story, your memoirs, or a non-fiction project. But we are not just a place to work; we have fun here, too, with lively open mic events, catered author appearances, and book launching parties

Small Press and Poetry Collection at Endicott College in Beverly, Mass.

Portrait of an Artist as a Young Poseur : 1974 to 1983 by Doug Holder

(To order click on picture) “Doug Holder is a poet of the old city, the city of our fathers, of the 1950s and later. Mr. Holder writes poems like notes in a diary. I found myself struck by their economy, wit, and urban melancholy... He has a voice unlike that of any of his contemporaries. Holder is a poet of the street and coffeehouses, an observer of the everyday. He writes of old Marxists, security guards and his relationship to his deceased father—themes of the common life. I am drawn to these poems as I am to the poetry of Philip Levine and the prose of James T. Farrell. But Holder’s poetry is deeper than that. He sees the world not for what it is, but on his own terms. He is living in the poem rather than in poetry.” ~ Sam Cornish, First Boston Poet Laureate

Portrait of An Artist as a Young Poseur by Doug Holder (Order on paypal.com)

OH Don't ,She Said..a poem/song project

( Preview and Purchase--click on pic) Oh Don’t, She Said ~ by Jennifer Matthews. Jennifer wrote this song after her friend and notable poet, Doug Holder, showed her his poem: “Oh don’t, she said, it’s cold.” After reading it, Jennifer felt inspired and heard a song in it. She had to change some of the words to make it work lyrically with the music, but she made sure to stay close to the original poem as much as possible. Jennifer played all the instruments on it and engineered it. It was mixed by Phil Greene at Normandy Sound, who worked with the likes of Mick Jagger, Bruce Springsteen and many, many other noted artists. Doug wrote it after a conversation he had with his mother while riding on a train to New York City. It is dedicated to her, Rita Holder. Genre: Rock: Acoustic Release Date: 2014

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So Spoke Penelope by Tino Villanueva

(Click on picture to order now!) "An intense poetic hovering over a situation of prolonged expectation....The poems in SO SPOKE PENELOPE are simply amazing, whether in the form of an apostrophe to the absent Odysseus or to the Gods, whether in a narrative past-tense mode or in the immediacy of the lived present, whether in the staccato of monosyllables or in the exuberance of unusual compounds, whether they employ Greek-feeling pentameter lines, alliteration, or anaphora. This poetic cycle shows that the whole range of human experience is contained in Penelope of Ithaca."—Werner Sollors

Visitors from around the country and world...( Click on real time view for complete list)

New From Muddy River Books: Eating Grief at 3AM" by Doug Holder

(To order click on picture) “There is a sad, sweet nostalgia in Holder’s Eating Grief at 3 AM, a sense of loss and sadness for the places and the people who were a part of those scenes: the hunchback, the Tennessee Williams’ half lost blondes, the turbaned men and the discarded move nostalgically through life. Yet Holder finds something almost like beauty or knowledge in the abandoned warehouses with weeds crawling to the roof. He imagines when Mrs. Plant, an old art teacher, was an enigmatic young woman ‘feverishly taking notes about the paintings, a love note stuffed in a pocket of her winter coat.’ There are always dreams, even if never fulfilled. There is so often the sense of time passing, of letting go-- letting go of people, letting go of Harvard Square Theater and the Wursthaus, balms that seemed like they would always be there. And they are and always will be in Holder’s moving poems.” — Lyn Lifshin, Author of Cold Comfort (Black Sparrow Press) "

Elizabeth Lund Interviews Doug Holder-Founder of the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

(Click on Picture to order) "Starting with Allen Ginsberg and ending with Charlie Parker, Sam Cornish takes us on a whirlwind tour of some of the livelier segments of 1950s and early ’60s American culture. With non-stop energy, syncopated rhythms, and a fast pace that keeps you humming as you turn the pages, Cornish visits a wide array of writers, musicians, and films, stopping along the way to visit local poetry scenes and pay tribute to the homeless and poor. Calling on Jack Kerouac, Langston Hughes, Marlon Brando, Miles Davis and a host of others, Cornish makes us feel the excitement of those times, even as he and his companions absorb the complex and often disturbing history of what he aptly calls “My Young America.” — Martha Collins

Read what people are saying about the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

click on pic for more info..... (Eric Darton, (bestselling author of 'Divided We Stand: A Biography of The World Trade Center): ' "...a terrific publication..." Diane Lockward ( New Jersey Council of the Arts Fellow and publisher of Tarapin Books)--"You provide an invaluable service for poets." Rusty Barnes ( Night Train magazine) "Doug. I know your reviewers have made a difference to me and my work. Keep up the good work". J.L. Morin ( Lecturer at Boston University/ Library Review) "That's a lovely blog you've got there, Doug Holder." ( Sherill Tippins--"Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel.") " I love your introduction, and fervently hope that Somerville never meets anything like the Chelsea Hotel's fate. It's always a pleasure to read your blog -- even when I'm not in it!" Alan Kaufman ( Editor of the "Outlaw Bible of American Literature")-- " ...a terrific blog..." Perry Glasser--( Winner of the Gival Press Novel Award): " The blog is very impressive." Elizabeth Swados ( Tony Nominated Playwright, Guggenheim Award Winner ): "Thanks you so much for this review on your blog. It helps so much, not just in terms of getting people to know that it exists, but also makes me feel that someone has gotten what I have tried to do. I wish you the very best." Marguerite G. Bouvard, PhD-- Resident Scholar Women's Research Center-Brandeis University: " I love reading your blog. What a refreshing respite from the New York Times. Thanks for all you do for poetry." Ed Hamilton--author of "Legends of the Chelsea Hotel" commenting on Chelsea Hotel article: " That's a great piece. Thanks for sending the link along." Richard Moore-- Finalist/T.S.Eliot Prize " I have just read your wonderful interview of the wonderful Eric Greinke!" Steven Ford Brown (Former Director of Research for the George Plimpton Interview Series "The Writer in America"): " You did a great job with the Clayton Eshleman interview, especially the personal stuff. So much better than doing the dry talk about literary polemics." Celia Gilbert (Pushcart Prize in Poetry) "Doug thanks so much for that fine shout out. I'm delighted how you put it all together!" Karen Alkalay-Gut, PhD ( Professor of English-Tel Aviv University) "Doug, I enjoy your posts immensely" Lise Haines ( Writer-in-Residence, Emerson College-Boston) "I love your blog!" "( Elizabeth Searle- Executive Board/Pen New England) : "Like your blog. I like the interview with Rick Moody." Ploughshares Staff- " Everyone at Ploughshares is a big fan of your blog." Suzanne Wise (Publicity Director Poets House-NYC): "Thank you so much for this wonderfully thoughtful portrait of our new home! You really "get us" and you translate that understanding vividly. I love the way you talk about Stanley's ( Kunitz) giant dictionary as a relic from another age. We're glad to preserve such relics." Kathleen Bitetti ( Chief Curator Medicine Wheel Productions/ Former Director of the Artists Foundation--Boston.) " Love your interview with Marc Zegans...wonderful blog!"

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Ibbetson Street is now in a partnership with Endicott College!

(Click on to go to the Endicott College Website)Ibbetson will be supported in part and formally affiliated with Endicott College.

The Arts and Literature in Somerville, Mass.: Off the Shelf with Doug Holder

( Click on picture to go to column) A weekly column in The Somerville News--Somerville's only independent newspaper!

The Somerville News Writers Festival Nov. 13, 2010

(Click on picture for full article)

ISCS PRESS--WE WILL PUBLISH YOUR BOOK!

Boston's leading co-publisher... (Click on title for more information)

The Boston Globe: Poetic Healing at McLean Hospital

This was the lead article in the Living/Arts section of the Boston Globe. (Feb. 2000) It has to do with Doug Holder's poetry workshops at McLean Hospital and the history of this literary landmark. (Click on pic for full article)

(Click on picture to view) A Production of Somerville Community Access TV's show " Poet to Poet : Writer to Writer." Moderator: Gloria Mindock, Producer: Doug Holder, Director: Bill Barrell

"The Paris of New England" Interviews with Poets and Writers" by Doug Holder

( Click on pic to order this and other Ibbetson Press titles) Interviews with poets and writers from the Paris of New England Somerville, Mass. " Thank you for your interview book. I read it straight through last night and enjoyed it very much...So many good ideas in one book." Eric Greinke-- Presa Press "Very engrossing collection of Holder's interviews, with a wide range of writers about their lives and work. Included are Mike Basinski, Mark Doty, Robert Creeley, Ed Sanders, Hugh Fox, Robert K. Johnson, and Pagan Kennedy.-- Chiron Review

Advertise with a popular online and print literary column in the heart of the Paris of New England

Reach a wide swath of the Boston Area literary community through The Somerville News' "Off the Shelf" literary Column with Doug Holder. The column is online and in a weekly print edition that reaches 15,000 readers. For more information click on picture.

Grolier Poetry Book Shop

" Poetry is honored every day at the Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Harvard Square, the oldest continuous poetry book shop in the United States. We stock over 15,000 volumes and spoken word CD's. Special orders are welcome. Come and visit us at 6 Plympton St. or online http://grolierpoetrybookshop.org (click on picture)

YOUR AD CAN BE HERE ( Click on pic for more info)

Doug Holder/ Founder/ Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene: Advertise with a popular Boston Area Literary Site--For Low rates-- Contact: dougholder@post.harvard.edu 617-628-2313

Poetry Workshops With Doug Holder

( Click on Picture for Doug Holder's website) Doug Holder has led poetry workshops, both for indviduals and groups for a decade now. Robert Olen Butler ( Pulitzer Prize Winner for Literature) wrote of Holder's work: " I've been greatly enjoying your poems. You have a major league talent, man." Available for individual or groups. Expert in gently helping the novice into poetry and the poetry scene. Reasonable Rates. Available for editing. Call 617-628-2313 for more information. Or email: dougholder@post.harvard.edu

Ibbetson Street Press

No One Dies at the Au Bon Pain by Doug Holder

Poems of Boston and Just Beyond: From The Back Bay to the Back Ward by Doug Holder

A poetry collection that deals with Boston, and Holder's experiences working on the psychiatric units at McLean Hospital

Of All the Meals I Had Before by Doug Holder

Click on picture to publisher page...

The Man in the Booth in the Midtown Tunnel (To order click on picture)

A new poetry book by Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene Founder, Doug Holder. "I'm enjoying 'The Man in the Booth in the Midtown Tunnel' -- perfect poems, especially in that ambiance." Dan Tobin -- Director of Creative Writing--Emerson College-Boston, Mass./ " It is quintessential Holder& bristles with sardonic wit. Congratulations."-- Eric Grienke (founder of Presa Press) / " I finished "The Man in the Booth in the Midtown Tunnel'...greatly enjoyed the menagerie of characters and imperfect human beings I met along the way. Excellent work Doug!"-- Paul Steve Stone ( Creative Director W.B.Mason and the autthor of "Or So It Seems.") / "I am reminded in the pages of this collection of meeting, a year or two before her death, the artist Alice Neel, who painted gorgeously surreal ironic portraits of famous and ordinary people in the 1930's and 40's--and shivering as she looked me over. Doug Holder looks at the world through a similarly sharp and amused set of eyes...Rich nuggets of humor and wry reflection throughout this collection." Pamela Annas ( Asst. Dean of Humanities U/Mass Boston/Reviewer Midwest Book Review) “....particularly liked The Tunnel—a little masterpiece!” Kathleen Spivack ( Permanent Visiting Professor of Creative Writing/American Literature at the University of Paris) "I want to tell you this was just about the best chap I ever read, I absolutely DEVORED it..."--( Robin Stratton--Boston Literary Magazine) "An acclaimed Boston-area poet writes about characters who have captured his interest over the years -- a colonial dame with purple hair, a postal worker ready to be returned to his sender, J. Edgar Hoover's secret love -- in this skillfull collection of short, free form poems." (Perkins School of the Blind Website) Click on picture to access Cervena Barva Press

About Me

Doug Holder is the founder of the independent literary press Ibbetson Street. He teaches writing at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston and Endicott College in Beverly, Mass. He is the arts/editor of The Somerville News, and for the past twenty years has run poetry groups at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass. His poetry and prose have appeared in the Bay State Banner, The Boston Globe, The Boston Globe Magazine, Rattle, Endicott Review, Long Island Quarterly, Toronto Quarterly and many others. He holds an M.A. in Literature from Harvard University.

Poems From The Left Bank: Somerville, Mass. by Doug Holder

( Click on picture to order) "The poems are full of life, witty and sympathetic and sharp all at once. And most of all, full of an engaged affection for the place and people. If Burns is Scotland's Bard, you are certainly Somerville's..." Kate Chadbourne, PhD ( Lecturer-Harvard University-Celtic Languages and Literature)

From The Paris of New England: Interviews with Poets and Writers" by Doug Holder

(Click on picture to order) Interviews by Doug Holder from the Paris of New England: Somerville, Mass. "I am impressed. A lot of great interviews compiled over the years."-- Brian Morrisey--Poesy Magazine / " A very engrossing read..."--Chiron Review / "Doug Holder knows how to ask important questions"--New Pages

Advertise with the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene.

Doug Holder founder says: "Reach a wide audience of poets, writers, editors and publishers, Have your ad linked to your site. The Boston area Small Press and Poetry Scene is well known in the small press community..." For information about rates, etc...email: dougholder@post.harvard.edu or call 617-628-2313